Silver halide photographic light sensitive materials are usually developed by making use of processing solutions such as a black-and-white developer, a fixer, a color developer, a bleacher, a bleach-fixer and a stabilizer, so that images can be obtained imagewise. Each of the processing solutions to be used therein is put into a plastic bottle in the form of a single part or plural parts of a concentrated solution so as to be supplied to users as a kit of processing agents. The users dissolve these processing agent kits in water so as to prepare a working solution (such as a starter solution or a replenisher solution).
In the photographic processing industry, there has been an increase in the so-called `Mini-Labs` which are small-scale photofinishing laboratories wherein a small-sized automatic processor is used. With the advance of the above-mentioned laboratory miniaturization, the quantities of the plastic bottles for processing agents has rapidly increased year by year.
Plastics have also been widely used, in addition to the above-mentioned bottles for photographic processing agents, because they are light and strong in constitution. The output of plastics in the whole world is constantly increasing year by year and, in 1988, the yearly output thereof increased to exceed one hundred million tons. On the other hand, the amount of scrapped plastics has become huge. Taking the case of Japan, about 40% of the output is scrapped yearly. When the scrapped plastic is abandoned at sea, the living environment of oceanic life deteriorates. In Europe, problems such as acid rain occur because plastic is burned in incinerators having imperfect exhaust-gas treatment equipment.
It may be considered to make a concentrated solution of powdered photographic processing agents. When this is the case, however, the fine powder is whirled up in the air when dissolving the powder. There may be a high possibility that operators may inhale the fine powder and therefore concerns for the health of the operators may be raised. Or, the components of the processing agent may settle from the air into other processing solutions and therefore the problems of contaminating the solutions and producing difficulties may be raised. Therefore, the techniques for granulating photographic processing agents so as to make a granulated mixture thereof have been proposed in, for example, Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection (hereinafter referred to as JP OPI Publication) Nos. 2-109042/1990 and 2-109043/1990, U.S. Pat. No. 2,843,484 and JP OPI Publication No. 3-39735/1991. In the techniques, however, the following problems have still remained unsolved; namely, the problem of labor safety and hygiene raised by whirling up a powdered processing agent; contamination of the agent into other processing solutions; the so-called caking phenomenon including precipitation or coagulation at the bottom of a vessel when dissolving the agent; and preparation operability hindrance that its own wet layer covers the powder so as to produce a dissolution failure. It is, therefore, an actual situation that the scope of chemicals suitable for powdering or granulating have severely been limited.
For the desirable shapes of the processing agents having the advantages displayable in the dried state, JP OPI Publication No. 51-61837/1986 proposes a tablet type processing agent.
As for tar-out inhibitors for preventing a developing agent from producing any undesired tar-out into a developing bath when processing a development (the term, `tar-out` means that a contaminant is deposited in the form of tar and the tar contaminates a processed material) and inhibitors for preventing from producing any undesired stain (that means stains on the white background of paper), the inhibitors having excellent characteristics including, for example, EG (ethylene glycol) , DEG (diethylene glycol) and TEA (triethanol amine) have generally been recommended to use so far as a liquid type processing agent (or a developing agent). However, these tar-out inhibitors are not suitably put to practical use as a solid processing agent, because every one of them is in the liquid phase. Therefore, any characteristic deterioration cannot be prevented in the absence of these inhibitors, and the improvement thereof is one of the urgent requirements.